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WordPress interactive video plugin
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Florian Thalhofer let us know that Korsakow 3 has been released. A system that has been compared to VD.
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John Jacobs a producer at the ABC POOL adds my blog post on his POOL lecture at RMIT
Tag Archive for 'reports'
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An early (1978) visual hypermedia mapping project of a city publihsed on laserdisc
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Adikted publish the xml keynotes from the videodefunct melbourne DIY TV lab
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Innovative, free online publishing of sci-fi using audio podcasts
Presentation at Melbourne University on New Media and Journalism by BBC World’s Anchor, Nik Gowing, BBC World. About:
BBC World is the BBC’s commercially funded international 24-hour news and information channel broadcasting around the world from its base at BBC Television Centre in London.
Nik Gowing is a major news anchor, presenter and works for BBC World a continuous news channel. The presentation titled ‘Community in Crisis New Media & New Real Time Tensions’. A excerpt from the brief for the talk sent out by email:
In the new, fast-changing information environment the traditional media are no longer alone in being witnesses of acute real-time crises. With the advent of camera phones, PDAs, broadband and ‘blog’ technologies, a new breed of ‘information doers’ have emerged. Illustrated by video examples, Nic will highlight the increasingly unresolved tensions in newsrooms, governments, military commands and corporate organisations.
Opening image for the presentation poster, a television with the cord pulled floating on an angle. Context given for the talk by Nik - political science, securities and new media. Title on his powerpoint, ‘Real Time Crisis - New Real Time Tensions’ These following notes are my own interpretation of what was presented and in some cases are direct quotes or my own short hand.
Tyranny of real time - previous paper online; other paper ‘War and Accountability - Media in conflict: the new reality not yet understood.’ The battle between rumours and news. News wants to deal with hard facts. How reliable are images from mobile uploads for example? The potential for a digital camera or mobile phone to challenge government policy. A “creditability crunch”. The issues centre around “immediacy”. His immediate example video taken of people arriving to the presentation dropped into his powerpoint.
Transparency, the connected networked nature of the world. Level of denial. What do I mean about real-time? Governments believe that they will be able to control real-time events. Example given of President Bush receiving news on television while he was on-air, of major events he was not aware had taken place. Governments, officials trying to shut down public and personal media coverage when events take place. The issue of perceptions sticking when news breaks (often based on personal media coverage) which may not be accurate.
Much of the points around immediacy in relation to video reminded me of the theorists Paul Virilio’s (Open Sky. London: Verso, 1997) comments on real-time video technologies and their effect on perception. Another theorist Jean Balludriard and his ideas on Simulacra and Simulation.
Back to Nik. The battle that goes on to secure the air waves (media) during and after a crisis. The acute difficulty of getting accurate real-time facts in a crisis situation. Transparency, the ability to transfer into the airwaves instantly from isolated high security locations through broadband, the Internet. A live feed in Lebanon is being streamed in real-time from a mobile phone from the Syria border. In detail in this example the video is delayed (called Store and forward video held on a laptop). The audio is real-time (when it was received - broadcast to the on-air TV news desk).
Transformation of the media by personal media producers. What is the status of personal media content? - the ability for anyone to record and upload. Serial deceivers. A real issue with accuracy. “A proliferation of attempts to confuse and mislead.” “Insurgents as media producers.” Stressing the trend of validation, working out what is accurate. Validation, trying to work out the source proves to be more and more difficult and a paramount issue. Also, concerns that journalists are being targeted, camera people recording events.
Digital divide - journalism - personal media making governments accountable. “Creditability Crunch” - the openness is leading to “law-fare rather than warfare”. The military needs to be aware due to “omni media” that they have to be accountable for everything.
Conclusion - We need to get smarter in regards to the battles emerging in the contemporary media sphere. “Asymmetric power”. The new empowerment creates ad-hoc groupings in a time of crisis. In the final example he showed mobile phone video recordings of the explosions underground in the London bombings. The way people are prepared to record events in a time of crisis in very insecure environments. From a news perspective there is working with what he calls a “user centered hub” at BBC world. During and after the bombings, they where barraged with personal media content (”1000 images, 20 video clips, 20,000 emails, 3000 text messages”). Dilemma for the news room, who do you run with the government who is behind what is actually going on, or the material coming from people at the scene? But, eyewitnesses also exaggerate or misinterpret and some are eager to get their faces in the media. How do you check what they are claiming? Where will it all lead? Next development will be live broadcasts streamed live on the Internet.
We need to question what the media is today. “Media ?” The technical definition of media. The ability to reveal. YouTube, Flickr, Crikey ..they are all becoming significant broadcast platforms.
ipods are great for research - I watched and listened to on the train a video download from the conference Beyond Broadcast 2006 Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. I checked out the talk by Peter Armstrong from OneWorld.net as part of the ‘Panel II: What the emerging participatory web media services are doing’. He focused on video online in his talk referring to the following sources:
BBC creative futures press release 25.04.2006 Issue here with the walled garden conundrum of keeping people - traffic inside the BBC web site. Also, in locking out or monitoring contributions from outside ‘gatekeeping’ - How participatory or interactive is this option?
Some of his points. With interactivity the podcast mode cuts this off i.e democracynow video. Interactivity for Armstrong is about liveness where the audience has the chance to email, phone-in be actively involved. A key part of his talk was the question for video databases - Make your own work and host it; or tag other work across the Internet (like google video for example); or just aggregate other work. Also, Armstrong believes ‘freedom’ is the significant objective for media producers, where they are not tied to or beholden to media organisations or governments.
In the AIR project coordinated by Beatriz, I identified a number of what could possibly called open source correlations which are written here as free flow thoughts. Firstly, the documentation is very detailed and informative with links to secondary sources and background processes. This seems to flow across many of Beatriz’s projects. For example a website was prepared in advance for this workshop with categories created for documenting the workshops at each location. I was really interested from a practice perspective on the types of documentation used to record projects like AIR or pigeonblog in detail. An example of how the processes are as important as the outcome, and are key components of the outcome. From an open source perspective documentation is a pivotal aspect of sharing knowledge or in this case providing the directions needed to create open hardware/software tools for collecting scientific data. (As I write Beatriz is recording photographic images of our group crowded around an electronic ‘breadboard’ connecting and disconnecting wires, in what I would call a miniature landscape.) AIR as a project is part of moving a data collection process out from the scientific enclaves into the hands of the broader community as Beatriz states in the summary of the air project:
AIR is a public, social experiment in which people are invited to use Preemptive Media’s portable air monitoring devices to explore their neighborhoods and urban environments for pollution and fossil fuel burning hotspots.
A process that is for example, emblematic of the shift of media production out of the high-end production studio into the hands of the public, who have access to a desktop computer and the Internet. Often we are fed statistics and have no idea of how these figures where collated. Having the opportunity to collect scientific data, like having the potential to produce media content is an empowering way to understand these processes on another level. The access in regards to building the hardware to collect data moves beyond the current social media model of all the work being done for the user. This is where increasingly all that has to be done is to add content to an infrastructure that has been developed. In the air workshop we follow specific stages, experiencing the development of the hardware needed to collect data from a bottom-up approach. Imagine in my own teaching getting students to assemble a weblog content management system, I wonder how that would effect their understanding of blogging. I did have one student who took a blog apart and stuck it back together by playing around with the PHP code, but that is pretty rare. Beatriz spoke of moving the contact with projects like ‘air’ beyond artists out into the community. In pigeonblog I was intrigued by the interest pigeon fanciers showed in becoming involved in the data collection process. These are art projects that engage with the general public in some form or another where people make contributions, and become involved.
Notes from the still/open workshop I am attending.
These are the notes I took down from my perspective as we presented our group work in the Alessandro Ludovico workshop. Our group handled the content aspect of hypothetical open source publication. We discussed the group making comments on these notes as there was plenty more discussed in the session that my be quite different form what I write here:
What it is about? Face to global is the title of the publication. The sub-heading for the publication “Source to Openness”. The concept for the idea comes from previous publication examples ‘Factsheet’ and ‘Whole Earth’ that Alessandro mentioned in his presentation. The publication is a directory for all things ‘open source‘ starting at the local level. This is what is happening in your neighbourhood from free wireless, free software development through to community based activities like ‘mothers groups’ who act as type of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. These groups as an example are voluntary brought together to network, socialise and share knowledge about raising a child. This is specialist knowledge that cuts through all the plethora of books and literature on the subject. The conversations in these groups are about editing this knowledge through hands on experience. ‘Face to global’ provides an index and reviews all these activities occurring locally. Activities are mapped and can be viewed electronically via social software. A theoretical influence “Think Global and Act Local”. The publication in hardcopy format or as a softcopy pdf, from front to back, starts local and progresses to global. Working with the ‘mute’ idea of being able to re-edit your own publication from existing content each location has the potential to assemble a publication that starts local and moves to specific global interests. With the editorial there would be differing forms of editorial overview applied to the varying types of publication that emerge from the content. An aspect of this approach would be to facilitate specialist publications like from the mothers group for example. Other publications could be edited from user-generated content that is collected through some type of social software. Each distributed in varying ways using for example print-on-demand for hardcopy output where the idea is to distribute tangible real paper publications back into the community. Like Brewster Kahle with his Internet Bookmobile these could be printed on street corners on demand.
Following up from my earlier rights online forum post, I found Andrew Garton’s introduction presentation. Which as he describes is influenced by the APC Internet Rights Charter , the Association for Progressive Communications: Internet and ICTs for Social Justice in Development. Andrew also provides on his blog an interesting report on the iCommons Summit 2006 held in Rio de Janeiro.
I have to confess I missed the video slam here in Melbourne. Anyway, Keith who I am working on a video database project with went along and slammed some video. More specific notes on the video slam blog. They had five groups of five people working on five 2-minute video sections. The AV content for these sections could be grabbed from Internet sources that provided creative commons licensed content. There was a copyright lawyer there and they brought 2 creative common reps down from Queensland. These people where checking the content and licenses as the groups put their sections together. The end objective was to then to join the 5 x 2-minute sections into one clip - which apparently by the end of the session was played back on a public screen at fed square here in the centre of the city. Keith described how his group opted to shoot some of their own video footage and remix instead the audio component which was creative commons licensed excepts of Kafka raves and other more well known literary giants. All stuff that was cleared by the cc reps. Keith said he went for this approach as an alternative to purely remixing video. I think, what is interesting about the way the event was put together is the idea of including a number of people in the process, people who had not worked together before. An approach that possibly follows more of a user-generated line than one artist doing a performance.